“You’re back early, Miss Pannicot. How did it go?”
“Not well, Sarah,” Rebbecca sighed. “Hopefully it will go better tomorrow. Any trouble here?”
“No, Miss.”
“I’ll be down below then, if anyone needs me.”

Rebbecca sat dangling her legs over the railing, watching the giant shadow of the city scudding over the clouds far below. The seven enormous propellers carved great gouges with their sweeping turns. For as long as she remembered this had been her peaceful refuge from the noise and bustle of the city and the engine room. Now there was a dull grating noise audible over the wind, louder again than it had been yesterday. The damage was not visible from here, not without clambering from ring to ring across the underside of the city, dangling in a harness over miles of empty space, but it was clear that it was getting worse every day.

The city’s heart pulses ceaselessly with the glow of neon and the throb of a pumping bass line. A light, insistent rain tumbles from the sky, closing the buildings and streets in on themselves. As it falls it collects the dust and smog from the thick air and breaks the flickering lights from below into a billion tiny pieces.

Far from the neon, in the winding maze of alleyways, a man, or something like one, lays half-buried in a mound of trash. Very slowly and groggily he wakes to find he has no knowledge of who or where he is. In the minutes it takes him to extricate himself from the garbage he searches his memory to find it all but empty. He is sure that this is not normal. That it needs his attention. At the moment, however, there are things which need his attention more. He is dizzy. There is a sharp pain in his neck. He is ravenously hungry. He bares his teeth, long and sharp, and sets off in search of a warm meal.

“Lasers.”
“Lasers?”
“Lasers!”
“That’s not an explanation, you know. You can’t just put on your science voice and say ‘lasers’ at me until I stop asking questions.”
“Your puny brain could not possibly understand!”
“Well I’ve managed to keep up with you so far. It was lasers, right?”

*CRASH*

“Your pseudo-scientific reign of terror is over, Professor!”
“Curses!”
“Mug! I knew you’d be back! Where did you manage to find a pantomime horse costume at this hour?”
“You’d be surprised what a little real science can do, Jenny.”
“Let me guess, you made it with lasers?”

*Laughter*

“I’m right here, you know.”

The shell of the building shook. A racking, sobbing shudder. There was a sound in the air that smelled like regret. Rubble and dust shook loose from the ceiling and showered over the three men, two scruffy and one clean-shaven, huddled in one corner.
“What in the hell is that?” whispered the clean-shaven one as loud as he dared.
“Christ, where you been, man?” yelled the younger of the two others.
“Don’t worry, son,” said the third, laying a hand on the clean-shaven man’s shoulder. “It can’t hear us. Can’t see us, either, not even if we were right in front of it. If we’re lucky it will keep moving and stay in a good mood.”
“This is a good mood? It slaughtered my whole team! Destroyed our ship!”
“It doesn’t know that. Doesn’t know anything except what it feels. What it makes others feel. And yeah, for a Mote I’d say regret’s about as close as it gets to whimsy.”

The feeling in the air was fading and the shaking growing less violent, and the clean-shaven man was beginning to recover.
“I… My name’s Casey. 3rd and 8th,” he shook the older man’s hand. “What division are you? Do you have a ship nearby?”
“Afraid not, son. The name’s Deacon, and this here is Silver.”
“Holy!” Silver had been slow to catch on. “Division? Ship? You’re from Orbit!”
“You’re not?” asked Casey, confused.
“Surface, born and bred. I ain’t never left the ground. Never even seen anyone from above, before.”
“Surface? Nobody lives on the surface. Not anymore.”
“That what they tell you up there, son?” asked Deacon. “You look old enough, if only just, to remember the exodus. What do you think happened to those who got left behind?”

He brought things home for her.

It had been flowers, in the beginning. She loved flowers, but only when he had stolen them from someone else’s yard. She could tell, too. He had tried buying a flower, once, and tearing the stem. He had slept on the couch that night. And then of course there was the bouquet he had stolen from a kerbside florist, that she had made him take back.

So he brought things home for her. The fuzzy dice from a parked car; a stuffed toy from the lost and found; letters from a shop’s sign. And, at least once a week, flowers.

A bear called Dennis eyed five guests hungrily. “I just keep letting my nose’s olfactory perception quietly remove sensible thoughts. Unfortunately vision wasn’t x-ray, your zoological aberrations be cursed. Did everybody finish gorging hungrily into jellied kaffir lime meringue? No-one ought pretend quickly, rather speak truth. Utter vermin would xerox youthful zeal, although best custom dictates exact fidelity.”

Gerald had ingested jellied kaffir lime meringue noisily, overly pleased (quietly rather stingy) that umpteen victuals were xylose-laden yet zestful. And better, courtesy Dennis, entirely free. Gerald haughtily intoned, “Jellied kaffir lime meringue never on plates queenly resounded so tastily!”

“Utter vanity!” winked Xavier. “Yet, zealotry aside, bravo! Capital dinner!”

“Eating food good!” huffed Iago, jokingly keeping long messages neatly out.

Peter, quietly ravenous, swallowed throughout.

Uri, very wisely, xylophoned “yes”, zebra-like.

“I do apologise, I’m quite sure I misheard you.”
“You did not mishear me, sir.”
“Then perhaps you misspoke,” Councilor Proom frowned. “The city cannot be landed. Such a thing is not possible. Were it possible, it would not be safe. Even were it to be possible and safe, I can conceive of no reason why it would be neccessary.”

Something in the tone of the Councilor’s voice snapped the patient, subservient air Rebbecca had been adopting all morning. “Just because something has never happened in your lifetime doesn’t make it impossible! And it certainly doesn’t make it unneccessary! Do you think I would be here if I was not sure? Have I been one to trouble the council with inconsequential problems over the years? I have been beneath the city and I have seen the damage and I tell you that we will be on the ground within the month. If you would prefer a crash to a landing, then on your head be it!”
She turned to leave. Councilor Proom called after her in a flustered voice, “Wait! This is… I can’t… I have no authority to make a decision like this.”
“Then point me in the direction of one who does.”
“No one person does, that’s the point of the council. I will have to call an assembly. Can you return next week?”
“I can return next week,” she said, “but I can give no guarantee that it will not be too late.”
“I… The day after tomorrow, then?”
She nodded. “Make sure the Guild of Engineers is present, too. I don’t like having to repeat myself.”

She was a librarian. Which is to say, she worked in a library. Which is to say, she worked in the library.

She wasn’t the type of librarian with her hair up in a tight bun, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and dispensing stern glances and shushes. Which is to say, she was only like that very occasionally when she felt like doing something special for her boyfriend.

She worked in acquisitions. The library, you see, as distinct from a library, was a whole separate set of dimensions outside of mundane time that held every edition of every book that had ever been published. That was the eventual goal, anyway. Right now, at least in her personal timeline, they were still stocking the shelves.

Her schedule for the day had her acquiring a first edition hand-lettered Shakespeare play. That was good news. She liked Shakespeare. She could do with an easy job, as well. She was still shaken from the debacle last week where she had misplaced the Voynich manuscript, an early Martian classic. Next to that, Love’s Labour’s Won would be a cinch.

Apologies to any IE users who visited the site before today. I had completely forgotten to test the compatibility of the site with your browser, and nobody had told me how horrible it looked. I’m going to pretend that it was due to a combination of being distracted by my PhD and wishfully thinking that nobody uses IE anymore. Anyway, whatever the reason for my lapse so far it should look okay now. I couldn’t get it perfect, but almost. If you use Opera or Safari or Lynx or something else and there are problems, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Oh, and if you dropped by to check out the Random Saying Generator and clicked through to the main site, welcome! Hopefully a few of you at least will find something of interest here.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that Tuesday marked the momentous occasion of the first story actually completed on the new site. I can’t promise this will become a common occurrence, but at least now there’s a precedent.

The stuff that gets posted on the story blog is, for the most part, posted without editing of any kind. When I finish whatever I’m writing, I submit it. If there are glaring mistakes I will go back and fix them, but beyond that nothing is changed once I hit post. This is actually a conscious decision, because the primary aim of this outlet is to get me writing again. I know what I’m like, and the lack of editing, the jumping back and forth between stories and one-off snippets, and the lack of any “quality control” (which is to say that if I write something for the page it gets posted whether I think it’s good or not) are all specifically to stop me from getting stuck on anything.

That said, the eventual goal of all this is to start producing full, edited, quality-controlled stories again. There are at least three novels waiting around in the wings to be written, including the sequel to Nadir. (To be honest it’s more like seven, but three are out ahead right now.) To that end, if and when I finish stories here I will re-post them in their full, stitched-together glory in a separate section somewhere. I’ll do my best to get that sorted in the next few days, and while I’m at it I’ll try to fix the “old stuff” section. When I stitch the stories together, I’m going to let myself edit and polish them. Realistically the degree of polish each story gets will probably depend on how attached I am to it, but I can live with that.

Oh, and speaking of quality control, the Jenny and Mug theme song has been stuck in my head for four solid days now. Yes, there is more to it than I posted the other day. No, I probably won’t record it for you guys. I did consider it, wondering if perhaps that might get it out of my head, but on reflection I think that’s unlikely.

Shuffles Barnaby had a gift. Some people saw it like that, anyway. Shuffles Barnaby could pull quarters out of noses. It looked like the most dated kind of sleight-of-hand, but it wasn’t a trick.

It wasn’t something he liked to spread around, but when people found out, as they inevitably did, they were envious. He tried to explain to them that he couldn’t pull quarters out of his own nose, and they just shrugged their shoulders. He tried to make clear the time investment and sheer embarrassment required to pay for something as simple as a meal with quarters from the waitress’ nose, and they just shook their heads. They thought he was lucky.

The worst part, he kept to himself. He had let it slip one night drunk at a bar and had had to move across the country the following week. The worst part was that if someone asked him to pull a quarter out of their nose, he had to oblige.